


The Velvet Sky

by writerdragonfly



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Dad!Sheppard, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-23
Updated: 2017-12-23
Packaged: 2019-02-19 06:12:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13117716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writerdragonfly/pseuds/writerdragonfly
Summary: Just because you hear your soulmate’s voice inside your head doesn’t mean the path from you to them is a straight line. Sometimes to take a step forward, you have to take a few back.





	The Velvet Sky

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nagi_schwarz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/gifts).



> For nagi_schwarz. I have admired your work for ages and was so excited to write for you. While I didn't get to devote the amount of time I would have liked to this fic and thus it's a bit rushed, I do hope you like it!

In the movies, it was simple. Once you found your voice, you fell in love and got married and everything was perfect and right and _easy_.

 

The movies never talked about falling in love with someone who wasn’t your voice, about thinking of always and forever and believing that everything would be okay if neither of you found your voice. The voice in your head that matched the pitch and tone and resonance and range and timbre and accent and language of your always and forever soulmate.

 

John knew that plenty of people found happiness with people who weren’t _their_ voice. He had, in fact, found some brief semblance of it himself.

 

While his relationship with Nancy hadn’t lasted, it had been worth every moment. Mini was worth every moment.

 

Her name was technically Minerva, but since the moment he held her in his hands for the first time, she had been his Mini. Minerva was the name her mother gave her, and while he hadn’t had a problem with the things the meaning of her name evoked, she wasn’t just the perfect balance of them to him.

 

She was his living, breathing, giggling Jiminy Cricket, even though her soft voice and inherited laugh sounded nothing like the voice in his head that the name came from.

 

She was the catalyst for his choices, his first priority and the one who he would follow no matter what. Finding his soulmate after she was born became less and less important.

 

Protecting her, that was the most important thing to him. Nancy hadn’t understood that, not the way he’d wanted her to. Oh, Mini was certainly his ex-wife’s priority as well. That was never in doubt. But, Nancy hadn’t been able to understand the _way_ he needed to protect her. Nancy had never been able to truly understand what his military career meant to him, but until Mini, that hadn’t bothered him.

 

All John wanted was to make the world safer for his daughter, in whatever way he could.

 

-x-

 

Mini was nearly fourteen when John’s life changed again. It was with a failed rescue and a bone deep loss and the realization that he could do whatever he could to protect the world but in the end he was only one man. He could only do so much, and if he died in the process, who would be there for Mini then?

 

Taking the option to finish out his tour in Antarctica after that had been an easy one. He could still do his duty there, without the crushing weight of his potential failure in death hanging over every split-second decision.

 

Except, then there’s a moment. _One_ _singular moment._ One moment, suspended in the sky with a superior officer and an experimental homing weapon hot on his tail, when John thinks maybe he made the wrong choice after all.

 

When it’s over, when it is John and General O’Neill and hard packed snow dusting up in their faces cold and wet, John hears his Soulmate’s voice in his head.

“Are you _insane!?_ You’re lucky you survived that, that would have been such a waste of your brains! And _Mini!_ What about Mini!?”

 

The rest of the trek to the Outpost after that is easy. Simple. His brain is still going a thousand miles a minute--” _what the hell was that?!”--_ but it’s better than it had been, in that drawn out suspended moment in time.

 

“Hey,” General O’Neill says to him after a brief conversation with a man that John doesn’t know but O’Neill obviously does, “Don’t touch anything.”

 

There is a part of John that says, “don’t move, don’t look, don’t do a good damn thing,” but that’s drowned out by the rest of him, speaking with the voice of the other half of his soul, too curious by far.

 

When he finds the man who sent the mysterious drone, he finds himself full of anger.

 

“Who the hell does he think he is?!”

 

And then he sits, and the chair lights up under him and leans back and the voice inside him is suddenly, utterly, _quiet._

 

“I just sat down,” John says, and there’s an intake of breath at his words from one of the other men who had come in the room that John... doesn’t quite understand.

 

Not until the man speaks.

 

“Major,” he says, and even with that one word, John _knows_ , “think about where we are in the solar system.”

 

**-x-**

 

“No,” John says when Doctor Weir asks him to come, and no matter how amazing exploring something like _Atlantis_ on _another planet_ would be, he means it.

 

“But Major Sheppard, this is the opportunity of a lifeti--”

 

  
“I’m not going to go play _Space Invaders_ , no matter what you think of my _genes_ . The whole damn trip is a suicide mission and I have too much to live for.

 

**-x-**

 

It isn’t that he _regrets_ his decision, because Mini was too important to even consider it.

 

But Rodney McKay-- _his soulmate_ \--hadn’t hesitated to leave on that one-way trip. He hadn’t done so much as _try_ to speak with John, instead brushed him off with such familiar cadence and harshness that it made John _ache_.

 

His tour is up three days after the expedition leaves, and John means to leave Colorado Springs, he really does.

 

Somehow though, knowing his soulmate is a _galaxy_ away makes it impossible for John to make himself go even further away from where he was.

 

By the time John finds a job and an apartment in Colorado Springs, Mini is fifteen years old and finishing up her junior year of high school. She is beautiful and kind and wicked smart, and John is so unbelievably proud of her.

 

She stays with him on long weekends and most holidays, settling into his tiny two bedroom apartment without complaint and lighting up his life with every moment of it.

 

John doesn’t for a moment regret his choice to put her first.

 

But sometimes, late at night, when she’s back in Boston with her mother, John goes out on his balcony and lies flat on his back, and tries to pick out that spot in the sky where his soulmate is and wishes he could touch him.

 

“God, you’re pathetic, Sheppard.”

 

**-x-**

 

“It’s a good school,” Minerva Kerrigan Sheppard says, crossing her arms in front of her chest in the same way her mother always did.

 

“You have one more year, Mini,” he argues, “Changing schools for your senior year when you don’t have to is--”

 

“I don’t _care_ , Dad. I want to spend more time with _you_ before I go to college!”

 

“Mini,” he says, because that’s what he wants too. But taking her away from her friends and her mother--he doesn’t know that he can do that.

 

“Mom said if you were okay with it, we could do it.”

 

“Just say yes, you idiot. You want this.”

 

“You already gave up something else you really wanted because you didn’t say anything.”

 

**-x-**

 

The video comes to him just off a night shift on duty, personally delivered by General O’Neill in his full dress blues for reasons John isn’t quite sure about.

 

He has half an hour before Mini usually wakes up, but the moment he opens the door to see O’Neill everything in him freezes.

 

“Oh, god, he’s dead,” his head supplies, and it’s only the fact that the voice isn’t staticy that keeps John from feeling the bone-deep loss he’s expecting.

 

“I have a video for you, Sheppard,” O’Neill says, and John lets him inside with shaking hands.

 

**-x-**

 

“Before I left, I said... some things,” his soulmate says, staring directly through him via the camera lens, “I said some things I didn’t really mean. I wanted... I never wanted a soulmate, you know. My parents, well, it doesn’t matter.”

 

John doesn’t hear Mini’s soft padding down the hall, too ingrained in watching his soulmate bare his soul to him with the knowledge that countless people would see it first and know.

 

“But then you were there and you were... instantly _everything_ I never knew I needed. Wait, no, That’s too... sappy, we can cut all of that out, right?” his soulmate asks the person behind the camera.

 

“Who the hell are you?” Mini’s voice carries into the living room, but John ignores it.

 

“I downloaded all of the files relating to you I had access too before we left. That was my... one personal item. That’s stupid, right? I didn’t even try to get to know you. But, you’re _brilliant_.”

 

“Let me in there! I need to make sure he’s okay--” Mini yells.

 

“There’s a chance,” Rodney McKay says, “that I won’t make it back. I guess you knew that, that’s why you didn’t come, right? Damnit, I’m out of time. Just, if I ever get back, I’m going to find you.”

 

“What the hell is--” the video stops as Mini forces her way past the general, freezing on a still of Dr. Rodney McKay in somewhat tattered BDUs and thick bandages around his arm, “Dad? What’s wrong? Who is... that?”

 

“I’m fine, Mini,” John manages to say, just barely, “I’m fine.”

 

**-x-**

 

Every day for weeks, Mini spends her free time at his side, drowning out the voice of his soulmate, the voice that John is afraid is going to go static with Rodney McKay’s death at any moment.

 

He doesn’t know the man, not the details that make him who he is.

 

But he knows his voice. The way he speaks and talks, the way his voice gets funnily shrill sometimes and the way sarcasm fills his words with biting accuracy.

 

He doesn’t want to lose him before he knows him.

 

**-x-**

 

“Oh my god,” Mini’s voice squeals out when she answers the door, and John has a metaphorical heart attack before he realizes it’s not a negative sound.

 

“Wait, what? Who the hell are you? Isn’t this Sheppard’s apartment? Are you his jailbait girlfriend?”

 

Mini’s laughter sets the person at the door off even more, and John finds himself racing to the front door without putting a shirt on or taking the toothbrush out of his mouth.

 

“McKay,” John breathes around his toothbrush before spitting it out and slapping it into Mini’s hand without even thinking about it. She makes a gagging sound before the laughter returns, that same honking noise that he used to be so self-conscious about.

 

“I’m sorry, this was stupid, I shouldn’t have--” McKay tries, but John just pulls him inside by yanking his shirt forward until the other man stumbles into him.

 

“Dad, I’m hiding in my room!” Mini yells between giggles as she leaves them, and John barely remembers to shut the door.

 

“I thought you were going to die,” John admits, and McKay pinks up at the words.

 

“Well, I didn’t. I’m a genius, you know, that’s how--”

 

“Did you mean it?” John asks him, releasing the other man and stepping back, one hand rubbing the back of his head.

 

“Mean what? I mean, I _am_ a gen--”

 

“That you wanted this, to figure out how we... fit?”

 

“Oh, um, yes, that. I would... like to... try.”

 

“Good,” John says, “good.”

 

**-x-**

 

“Yes, but the math says that if you--”

 

“I know that, who do you think I am?”

 

“Oh my god, you’re both such _men_. Dad, if you use base eight, then the math supports Rodney’s original idea without sacrificing the rest of the equation.”

 

John shares a look with his boyfriend before they both turn to his daughter.

 

“Say, Minerva,” Rodney asks, “what do you want to do when you graduate from MIT?”

 

 


End file.
